Clear the set – Madonna wants to express herself

Madonna's film about Wallis Simpson has just been panned - but she's already
planning a comeback...

Madonna has chosen an apt subject in Wallis Simpson for her first film: both were Americans pursued by scandal who moved to London and married Englishmen - and possessed of a faintly paranoid sense of victimhoodPhoto: Springs

Ah, the sights of Venice! Over here, the Piazza San Marco, over there, the Campanile, and floating face down in the Grand Canal, the audience for Madonna’s latest movie. The old place may be in peril, but its chances of staying afloat currently look a lot better than those of the Material Girl’s film career.

She wafted into the Venice Film Festival last week, already trailing rumours that her first big directorial effort, W.E. – a new take on the Edward and Mrs Simpson story whose title is based on the couple’s monogrammed initials – wasn’t very good. For months the movie blogosphere, a place where cruelty knows no limits, had been abuzz with stories that Harvey Weinstein, the hard-to-please mogul who had secured the rights to the picture, was urgently trying to unsecure them.

Perhaps Harvey had only just stumbled on the scene where Madonna has Wallis Simpson jump on to a dance stage to boogie with a Maasai warrior while the Sex Pistols play Pretty Vacant.

Then came the reviews. “Burdened with risible dialogue and weak performances, the pic doesn’t have much going for it…” wrote the Hollywood trade magazine Variety. “An extraordinarily silly, preening, fatally mishandled film,” said the Guardian. “Has to be seen to be believed, since even the best-chosen words falter before its galactic-level awfulness,” winced the IndieWire movie-news site. “Weird, brown-nosing and slightly vile,” complained Time Out.

All right, a couple of critics were kinder. “W.E. is better than expected,” David Gritten noted cryptically in The Daily Telegraph: “It’s bold, confident and not without amusing moments.”

Rather overlooked in all the critical bottle-throwing is that even if Madonna is no one’s idea of the next Tarkovsky, she’s an intriguingly apt choice to make a film about Mrs Simpson. Both were Americans, pursued by scandal, who moved to London and married Englishmen. Both were fashion radicals, who changed the look of their times, constantly re-invented themselves, and were possessed of a faintly paranoid sense of victimhood.

Let Madonna explain: “People have accused Wallis of all kinds of things. It’s just the usual lynch mob mentality that descends upon somebody who has something that lots of other people don’t have.” And here’s Wallis on the art of reinvention: “A woman’s life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling challenge or situation, and each marked off by some intense experience.”

Naturally, neither of them ever stopped complaining. At the Venice film festival last week, where she was holed up at the Bauer hotel – described in one guide as “a timeless, peaceful world of luxury and sophistication”, the 53-year-old singer protested that the price of showbusiness success was that “you’re given a few attributes and you’re not allowed to have more than that”.

Among the attributes Ms Ciccone, a former Dunkin’ Donuts waitress from Bay City, Michigan, has been given is the somewhat risky assumption that she knows how to make a big-budget movie. One that has remained miraculously intact even after the fiasco of her first directing effort, Filth and Wisdom (2008) – the story of a cross-dressing Ukrainian immigrant who wants to be a rock star – which was deemed unreleasable.

For all that, it is hard to fault Madonna’s persistence. For 30 years, she has knocked down every obstacle to her quest for unceasing cultural relevance. In the process, she has sold 300 million records, more than any other female singer in history, and remains a permanent fixture on every list of “world’s most powerful/ admired/ influential women”. Some years ago, an American critic wrote that: “When you imagine Madonna, you don’t see a single image, but a time-lapse photograph, with one persona melting and warping into the next.”

And so, when the record sales began to flag and the tour venues reported that seats were becoming hard to shift, and the perception arose that the whole Material Girl phenomenon might be running out of puff, what could be more natural than for Madonna to launch into something else?

Her marriage to director Guy Ritchie, the son of a well-connected London advertising executive, had given her a first-hand insight into movies, and the couple’s purchase of Ashcombe House, a magnificent, 1,200-acre Georgian pile in Wiltshire, a taste for English country life. It was during this time – togged out in tweeds and gumboots and giving a passable impersonation of Audrey fforbes-Hamilton – that Madonna appears to have developed a fascination with the story of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Raising the subject at a dinner party, she discovered, “was like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the room. Everyone erupted into an argument.”

The problem was how to tell a much-told story differently, and in a suitably Madonna-esque way. Or, at least, a way that didn’t make it look like a rip-off of The King’s Speech. The solution appears to have been part of the film’s undoing.

In W.E., the abdication crisis unfolds in parallel to the story of a modern-era New York trophy wife, who harbours an obsessive interest in Wallis Simpson, and who, in the words of one reviewer, “totters in and out of the drama like a doped pony”.

Weinstein is putting a brave face on things. When his company snapped up the project, he claimed it was “a very smart film” and “a stunning feature. I’m incredibly excited about this movie.” Later accounts had him looking “thunderous and sour” as test audiences gave their verdicts.

Madonna will cope. She always has done. No longer married to Ritchie, she is currently on the arm of Brahim Zaibat, a 24-year-old French rap-star toyboy whom she credits with reviving her appetite for pop music. Last month came news that she was returning to the recording studio to make yet another album: “It’s official,” she wrote on Twitter. “I need to move. I need to sweat. I need to make new music. I’m on the lookout for the maddest, sickest, most bad--- people to collaborate with.”